Disabling livecheck in subports

[Ryan Schmidt]

It seems to me that livecheck should be disabled in subports. I use "port livecheck maintainer:ryandesign" to check all my ports for updates, and I imagine other maintainers do similarly, and it is of no benefit to check the same software multiple times; it just wastes time and network bandwidth.

For example, I have the php54 port I'm developing. There are many subports, but they all come from the same distfile. All the same version of the software. I only need the main php54 port to tell me when a new version is available; I don't need all the subports to tell me the same thing as well. The same goes for any port using the unified python portgroup.

So far I've seen a lot of this kind of code in such ports:

if {${name} == ${subport}} {
	livecheck.type ...
	livecheck.url ...
	livecheck.regex ...
} else {
	livecheck.type none
}

This is tedious. It might be a good idea if MacPorts base itself would disable livecheck for subports. What do you think? (I don't think e.g. the python portgroup could do it, since the portgroup's code loads at the beginning of the portfile, and livecheck is not set by the portfile until later.)

The only problem would be ports that have subports with different versions. This should be a very unusual occurrence; currently this is only py-htmldocs, py-ipython and py-sympy, and the latter two are not a problem: they both define older versions for older python versions because newer versions of the module no longer support older python, and therefore disable the livecheck in those subports already. So the only obstacle is py-htmldocs.